best architecture schools?

The list is out and my school ranked #10 but I always wondered how they come up with the results. Do they look at our grades? Judge us by how many get hired after graduating? Come to our reviews and compare? Ranking in the design field is just too subjective. Who should really be the ones to judge? There's architecture politics involved and there are way too many schools and student/ faculty in the U.S. involved to properly justify a school ranking. Just as we rank schools, how can we judge firms out there? We can only tell by their documentation (the print media the firms publish and get published about, the websites etc.) they put out there. But even that, we can only deem them "my" favorite or "your" favorite, there's no such thing as everybody's favorite.

On another note, the trip to SF was tons of fun
It’s nice to get out of studio once in a while...
Powell station. My home for the weekend

Favorite projects we visited:
DeYoung museum by Herzog & de Meuron

BAM (Berkley art museum)
Unhappy museum employee telling me that there were no photos allowed on the right

Finally, we are starting on our final project. We just completed our site analysis and currently we are in design mode. The project is a "lifestyle center" for a car brand. Our site is located just blocks away in downtown LA, right across from LA live. It's pretty exciting to be integrating everything we've learned this year: space/form movement/sequence and now the urban, after our last precedent study and San Francisco (which I miss so much already) trip.

The rankings are determined by a survey of practitioners (mostly hiring managers) asked who they think are most prepared entering practice upon graduation. This year they've added a few more qualifications to the methodology:

Essentially it is a "How-is-your-school-viewed-(nationally)-by-employers" poll. Which is not to discredit it at all. Only to say that it puts an emphasis on professional practice, though most students do this as well.

Interestingly the Dean Survey top 5 are all in the Practitioner top 10 exept Auburn (undergrad) and Princton (grad).